Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song

I will be reviewing the Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song from the Library of Congress collection for this entry. The exhibition highlights the letters that Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song wrote in the 1940’s-1950’s to the Library of Congress. There are also several other parts including a page about the “Life and Times of Woody Guthrie” written by Mark Allan Jackson. He essentially writes a timeline of his life starting from his birth in Oklahoma to his search for more work in California to going to New York to play Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road, and finally to his death in 1952 because of Huntington’s Disease which his mother also had. The page has loads of information with some really interesting pictures, but I think that with a little bit more of an interactive twist, it would have held my attention longer. The long lines of text made me think it was more like a newspaper or some other printed publication and didn’t hold my attention for long.

The next page is a more in depth timeline with no explanations to events, just dates and specifically what happened. This would be very useful for someone writing a report or researching Woody Guthrie because they can get straight facts without having to sift through other information.

With more look at the site, this exhibition would be perfect for someone doing a research paper. There are straight facts with lots of information and nothing getting in the way of finding that information. For someone just wanting to learn about Woody Guthrie, this could be a bit boring and make them want to go to another site. Upon looking at the “About the Collection” page, it says that one can access all of the songs for Woody Guthrie, but they are on a different site. I would think that it would be beneficial to everyone if the songs were on this specific site, or even a direct link to the other one. I’m not going to say that this exhibition is bad because there is so much information and pictures that it cannot be bad. But I will say that a lot can be done to make it more approachable to a broader range of people. Maybe something as simple as not putting as much text on one page because it becomes very hard to read after a certain point. I think I would very much enjoy this exhibition if I had a specific intent to get something deeper out of the exhibition, like research for a paper. One thing that this site does do for me is make me more interested in researching his songs and listening to them. The addition of letting the reader of the site look at the specific letters that Woody wrote to the Library of congress is quite amazing and something that I will take a further look into at a later time.

This is in response to the Web Exhibition Review Project.